The median is the one that splits a data set in half and picks the middle.

ICQ is still around, seems like it is mainly used by Russians now.

Have you not noticed the rise in groups like Proud Boys, Patriot Front, and the Three Percenters? Patriot Front has people on overpasses waving signs in my area and they are in the news several times per year for marching in different cities. Just the other day they were recorded in New York City, unable to figure out how to swipe metro cards to get into the subway, so dozens of them charged on through without paying, so it isn’t like they are staying holed up in rural militia compounds out of sight. Far right extremism is both active and on the rise locally and globally.

Ok now I am curious where you live that you have to provide ID to shop. Here in the US we scan the items and then swipe our payment card, the ID is only used to check your age for tobacco and alcohol purchases which can’t be sold to minors. An employee has to come look at the ID to make sure a minor hasn’t borrowed someone else’s, so it doesn’t even get scanned. Employees just swipe their work badge and confirm that they checked your age.

As for the pain, a lot of self checkout systems have very limited space and can be awkward to run all your items through. Manned stations have the conveyor so you can unload multiple items from your cart at a time to be scanned. They also have more end space so you can have room to bag everything if you are doing a big shopping trip.

Not all of us kept our Reddit accounts though.

I remember Postal Service profitability being a political issue under the second Bush, too. Trump didn’t start that. He probably even benefited from the previous rounds because he bought a historic post office in DC when it was sold off and he turned it into a hotel. That’s the same hotel where people stayed during his presidency to curry favor with him.

My cousin visited Texas from Germany and took a train from Dallas to Austin. The track sharing with freight was insane, the trip took 9 hours due to freight having right-of-way on the tracks. It’s only about a 3.5 hour drive. He was not impressed at all.

Sarcasm in person generally comes with a distinctive tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language that are lacking in text-only communication. If people know you well enough in a text chat, they can often make assumptions about your seriousness based on what they know of your beliefs, but we are on an anonymous message board here. The people here have no experience with whether or not you are naive or a jokester or seriously confused. There’s a reason it became standard to mark sarcasm on reddit with /s, it is the simplest replacement for the missing tone and body language context that would go along with a statement if we were communicating face to face.

Edge is a chromium browser, too. It has been for some time now.

That’s my kid’s primary way of communicating with friends. It’s popular among high school students, or at least the band nerd subset of high school students.

Firefish is another fediverse microblogging platform and it has search and quote tweets, but you can’t follow hashtags in your regular timeline (you can set up a separate timeline called an antenna that regularly pulls in posts according to a list of words or hashtags you specify). It also has a tweet deck style layout you can setup and you can easily follow and be followed by mastodon users from a firefish account.

There are other alternatives as well, but this is the one I am most familiar with.